Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Franciscans of The Immaculate--and Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, OFM Conv.

Let me write a bit more about the
Franciscans of the Immaculate—or rather let me compare and contrast their two
sources of inspiration—Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe OFM Conv.and Saint Francis of Assisi.

Raymond Kolbe was born January 8
1894 in a section of Poland then occupied by and ruled by Russia.His father was an ethnic German (and the
name was Kolb) and his mother, Polish.He had three siblings, only one of whom lived to adulthood.His father was arrested and executed by the
Russians shortly before Maximilian was ordained a priest because he, the
father, was involved in the movement for Polish independence and nationhood.From his childhood Raymond was inculcated
with a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.Kolbe and his elder brother, Francis, in 1907
fled Russian dominated Poland to Lvov in the Austrian ruled Polish Ukraine
where they entered the novitiate of the Conventual Franciscans.Kolbe was sent on to study in Rome where he
earned doctorates in both Theology and Philosophy.

During his time in Rome he witnessed
a massive demonstration by the Italian Freemasons against the Church and
attacking the Pope, Pius X, personally.Demonstrators
filled Saint Peter’s Square—then part of Italy—with blasphemous banners and
shouting obscene slogans.All this needs
to be put into the context of Italian independence and the virulent
anti-Catholicism of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian George Washington, a Mason
and freethinker who hated the Church and papacy.Italian Freemasons were a noisy minority more
inspired by a hatred of organized religion than the principles of Freemasonry,
but for Kolbe the Freemasons became the bogeyman of evil attempting to destroy
the Church.

This experience of Freemasonry in
Italy led Kolbe on his return to Poland to organize the “Militia of the
Immaculate,” a movement of Polish laity to combat the influence of
Freemasonry.The battle with Freemasonry
became the organizing principle of Kolbe’s life.Don’t misunderstand Kolbe’s conservativism—
Kolbe was a thoroughly modern man and used the modern media in his battle
against Freemasonry.He opened a
publishing house that printed catechisms and other instructional materials as
well as devotional tracts, he had a daily newspaper with a quarter million readers,
and a monthly magazine that had a million subscribers.He also used the radio in his attempts to
reach an audience.He had two passions: for the Blessed Mother and against Freemasonry.

Unfortunately, Kolbe and other
anti-Freemasons often slid into anti-Semitism.European Freemasonry in the late 19th and early 20th
century included many secular Jews precisely because Freemasonry advocated an
intellectual and scholarly freedom of thought that more conservative religious
voices—orthodox rabbis as well as Catholic theologians—feared.Freemasonry was the voice of secular
intellectualism and embraced the ideas of Spinoza, Rousseau, Hume, Darwin, Nietzsche,
Freud, Ingersoll, Einstein and others.By no means were all Freethinkers Jews but secular Jews were prominent
among Freethinkers and this undermined the hopes of many Poles not simply for
an independent Poland but the restoration of Catholic Poland, and not only Catholic
Poland but a Marian Poland.

Anti-Semitism is woven into the
Polish Catholic culture going back for centuries.It is not that many Catholic Poles did not
have good relationships with their Jewish fellow Poles. (One cannot say
neighbors because for the most part Jews and Gentiles lived in separate
communities, even when in the same cities and there was not much contact
between Christians and religious (orthodox) Jews. One of my favorite sites in Krakow is
Kazimierz, the old Jewish Quarter.When
one goes there now one sees the desolation created by the Holocaust: the elegant
synagogues now museums of a vanished, slaughtered, culture.)Nevertheless, many Polish Catholics and many
Polish Jews, at least among those who were integrated into mainstream Polish
society, were friends.Jerzy Kluger and
Karol Wojtyla, later John Paul II, were boyhood friends and that was not
unusual.But in the Polish tradition
there were stories and legends and songs of the blood libel, there were
depictions in stone and stained glass of Jews murdering Christian children,
bedtime stories and campfire tales made Jews out to be bogeymen and
monsters.Kolbe was not conscious of
this flaw in the culture and often reinforced it in his attempts to discredit
those he saw as enemies of the Church.

Kolbe’s work brought the Conventual
Franciscans to prominence in Poland and the number of vocations enabled them to
open missions in Japan where Kolbe served for several years in the 1930’s—but
his publishing work was too important for him to be away for long.Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941
for—among other things—sheltering Jews in his monastery.He was sent to Auschwitz.

Now Auschwitz was actually four main
camps and 45 satellite camps.Kolbe was
sent to Auschwitz I.This must be
differentiated from Auschwitz II or Birkenau which was primarily an extinction
camp where prisoners were normally held only until they could be gassed.Auschwitz I was primarily for long-term
prisoners.While, there are exceptions
Jews normally were marked for extinction; Poles were held in Auschwitz I and
kept for forced labor.The two camps, by
the way, are remarkably different.While
Birkenau was a massive complex of wooden barracks in which those Jews were held
who were not to be gassed immediately but worked to death, wooden barracks that
were no more than huge shacks that did not even keep out the cold and which
held hundreds of slave-prisoners, Auschwitz I was an orderly village of
well-built brick structures which housed the prisoners.In Auschwitz I There were trees and
stone-lined avenues among the barracks.It was by no means a pleasant place but it wasn’t the architecture of
despair and death that marked Birkenau.Of course most of those sent to Auschwitz II or Birkenau were gassed
immediately.

In Auschwitz I Kolbe was put to work
as were the rest of the prisoners.He
was only there about five months when three prisoners escaped.As a warning to other prisoners, ten men were
selected to be put in a starvation bunker where they would die a slow and
painful death of hunger.One of the ten,
Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out “O, my wife, my children!”Kolbe stepped forward and asked to replace
the family man.

Kolbe lasted two weeks without food
or water.He kept up the courage of the
other prisoners by singing with them and telling them stories as well as giving
them the reassurances of our Christian faith.Finally he alone was left alive—barley alive.A nurse was sent into the cell to give him an
injection of Carbolic Acid. It was August 14th, the vigil of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Kolbe’s canonization was not without
controversy.Anti-Semitic passages from
his magazine and newspaper were cited.John Paul II was passionately determined to advance the cause of his
fellow Pole however.The anti-Semitic
tone of some of his writings needs to be balanced against his actions which not
only show no trace of animosity towards Jews but a recognition of the human
dignity of all people regardless of race or creed.The anti-Semitism found in Polish culture was
woven into his personality much as racism has become part of the warp and woof
of American culture.It is a reminder to
us all to be very critical of our cultural assumptions and examine our own
words to see when they betray prejudices of which we are not consciously
aware.Paula Deen isn’t the only racist
in America.Far from it.

Kolbe was devoted to the Virgin Mary
and is devotion to her can be said to have marked his spirituality far more
profoundly than his Franciscanism.While
they are not, of course, mutually exclusive, in our next entry we will look at
Saint Francis and see what he brought to the Church.The Franciscans of the Immaculate are far
more disciples of Maximilian Kolbe than they are of Francis of Assisi.That is not a problem but it needs to be
noted.

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About The Man Behind the Curtain

Welcome to "What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You." I have always had a passion for history, and Church History (or, as it is better termed "The History of the Church") and in this blog I hope to bring up interesting--and frequently deliberately overlooked--facets of the history of the Catholic Church. I will probably also dip into the history of other Christian Churches from time to time and even that of non-Christian religions, but I do hope to keep my focus on the History of the Catholic Church. I am particularly anxious to show that the Catholic faith--which while doctrine tells us "comes from the Apostles" (and presumably to them from Jesus) is in fact, like all historical institutions, an evolutionary phenomenon. There is a huge difference between Tradition and traditions,. What many"Traditionalists" are caught up with today is not Tradition at all but various minor customs of human origin and little or no theological significance. As a Catholic myself, I am anxious to separate the wheat of the Gospel from the chaff of religiosity.

I am a life-long Catholic and a professional historian (M.A., Ph.D) who also has a Master's in Theology. My grade school (Sisters of Mercy), high-school (Society of Jesus), and undergrad university (Society of Jesus) education is all in official Catholic, Kennedy Directory listed, educational Institutions as is the Grad School where I earned my Theology Degree. My History Degrees, Master's and Doctorate, are from a private East Coast University (where Jews teach Christianity to atheists) that ranks in the top one-hundred American Colleges and Universities lists. I chose a secular campus for my history work precisely so that I could not be accused of having done an "in-house" educational program. As it worked out I had one Catholic professor for one course and that course was "The History of Islam." I currenlty teach on a graduate faculty and specialize in medieval spirituality (of which I am not only a professor but a practioner) and in History of the American Church. I have also been invited around the English Speaking World to give classes and workshops--England, Ireland, Australia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, and Texas (among other places). I have spoken at conferences in Rome, Sao Paulo, Nantes, Krakow and other non-Anglophone locations in Europe and the Americas. I have done lecture tours on a prominent cruise line commeting on European History and the various ports of call--a great job if you can get it. In other words, I am not an amateur at this.

I am thoroughly committed to the program of the SecondVatican Council as it was promulgated in 1965 (as contrasted with how it has been reinterpreted, in some cases almost out of existence) by both self-appointed and divinely anointed authorities over the last thirty-some years. As I get older I realize that the Council is an opportunity for us Catholics to embrace the Gospel as the guiding light of our lives and is toogreat an opportunity to be bypassed by those who are anxious to see a revival of the juridicism, triumphalism, and clericalism decried by Bishop Emil de Smedt in the opening session of the Council. There are those "fleshpots of Egypt Catholics" who want to retreat to the slavery of pre-conciliar American Catholicism," but as for me, I still believe that John XXIII (and Pius XII before him and Paul VI after him) saw a promised land of a mature and evangelical Catholicism so needed in the 21st century and I for one embrace the future, not the past.

By the way, historians are those who embrace the future and realized that the past is there to guide us toward it. Those who embrace the past and seek to restore it are antiquarians. Christians know that we stand facing the future for that is from where the Kingdom of God calls us. Those who prefer restoring the past have not yet heard that call. Or, as one spiritual director once told me: "If God had wanted you to live in the 13th century (or the 18th, or the first half of the twentieth) he would have put you there. He put you in the present facing the future.That is where your vocation is."